Meet the new revolution, same as the old revolution.
Robert Blair Kaiser, dissenting Catholic and former Time writer covering the Church, has started a new web site called “Take Back the Church,” which is nothing more than the same old Call to Action gruel reheated and served up lukewarm.
In fact, it offers the same pablum from the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church that Voice of the faithful was founded upon: demands for democratic elections, tossing out 2,000 years of dogma, the creation of a governing document for the Church modeled on the US Constitution, the whole spiel. Here’s Kaiser’s sales pitch:
Let’s cut right to the chase. Everyone talks about the weather in the U.S. Catholic Church but no one does anything about it. We propose to do something about not only the weather, but the climate as well—with your help. In fact, without your help, and the help of a million others like you, we won’t be able to demand the action necessary to create the Church we need. If you’ve been following the horror stories for the past four years, you know it isn’t only the spectacle of sex abuse by a relatively few American priests that makes us ashamed of our Church. It is the systematic cover up of that abuse by most of the nation’s bishops.
MISSION STATEMENT
Seeking ownership and citizenship in the people’s Church envisioned at Vatican II, attended by accountable, listening servant-bishops.
Yawn. Is it still 1968 in your world?
[Thanks to Gerald for the link.]Technorati Tags:Catholic, dissent, doctrine, heterodoxy, liberalism
bk_keywords:Catholic Catechism.
Back in my earlier graduate days (at the University of Dallas), I had the unfortunate pleasure of having a dinner with Mr. Kaiser at a school function. It was with a small group of students, with the theology chairman and the president of the university. It was at that dinner that the veil over my eyes dropped and I saw what direction the president of the university wanted to take the school and then I had little doubt about the orthodoxy of the theology faculty chairman. God has been very gracious to me and I forgot most of what transpired during that meeting, except for the fact that the president (now gone from the school) wanted to invite “Charlie” Curran over to speak at the school. It would be no big deal considering they were jogging buddies and lived next door to each other, and they talked regularly. I guess the other thing I remember is that after the dinner, Kaiser gave a lecture in the university chapel which bored me because I don’t remember anything he said other than remembering he told personal stories from the good ol’ days in the 1960s. God has been gracious indeed!
My wife does not have such a blessing from God to lose such memories of a dinner with Kaiser. My wife, too as a grad student, was there and recalls with disgust the comments made concerning contraception. The president of the university, the theology chairman (no longer chairman – and I believe he does not teach under the theology faculty anymore either – took a leave of absence because the program and students were too rigid, alas!), and Kaiser all agreed that the Church was wrong about contraception. The proof was in the pudding, as the saying goes, I believe. As one of them said, and my wife cannot recall which one said it, “the people have spoken.” Needless to say, all of us grad students were stunned during this dinner.
“You know, in the good ol’ days, dissenters had the decency to leave and set up their own church. Why don’t these people do the same?”
Because it is not about decency or dissent, but about power and control.
Shouldn’t that be old whine in new whineskins?